From March 9th to the 13th, Battersea Arts Centre and Izba Arts present an exhibition of works from across the former Eastern Bloc focused around belonging, myth and renewal. Weaving together stories old and new through a series of films, performances, paintings and interactive installations, the show brings together artists reclaiming and reimagining Eastness and its culture as a source of connection with ourselves, nature and one another.
Featuring works by 30 artists, this show co-curated by Margarita Makhanova and Ksenia Kazintseva galvanises the energy of this community to unpack how experiences of migration and assimilation speak universally and how notions of belonging and visual language from this region have impacted British culture. It overlaps with the Spring Equinox and celebrates Maslenitsa – an Eastern European traditional event that sends away the pagan goddess Marena / Mara, who symbolises cold and death, by burning her figuring made out of hay, and welcomes in spring. This celebration later became aligned with many Orthodox traditions even non-religious communities partake in around this time including an alternative to Shrove Tuesday, using up animal products in pancakes before Lent. This entire time period is focused on reflection and renewal.
Whether you’re able to join us in person, or want to know about the exhibition remotely, we’ve chosen to create a walk-through of the works and artist stories involved that you can refer back to:
Kupala
Anna Kurkova is an artist of Belarusian heritage working primarily in painting and drawing, but also interested in printmaking and sculpture.
Anna thinks of her work as a bridge between personal myth and sensory materiality of physical experience. She is interested in the idea of journeying and belonging as a catalyst for ways stories can be shared and collaged through visuals. Anna uses the semiotics of religious rites and rituals to choreograph dioramas suspended between seeing and perceiving. Real corporal presence of materials that constitute the work is an important feature of the making process, as Anna brings into focus the tension between the surface, pigment and self.
Origins
Patricia is a Romanian interdisciplinary artist rooted in performing and visual art.
She explores how identity shapes us – more than we often give it credit for. Modernity made us forget our ancestral past, but we must remember the untold stories of generations – the violence, the sadness, the joy, the land, the oppression, the tradition.
She is the first woman in her lineage that has been given a voice. This piece is about the influence of roots, and tradition in one’s journey. It aims to picture the untold stories of oppressed women
Zula is a London-based documentary photographer, specialising in community-based portraiture and documentary storytelling. She focuses on themes of migration, Eastern Europe, and queer communities, drawing inspiration from her Polish heritage and upbringing. Through her photography, Zula aims to amplify voices often overlooked, using an intentional approach to explore the complexity of identity and the power of human connection.
Geography of Strangers
This project brings together two multimedia installations that examine the shifting political landscape in the UK alongside the rise of right-wing politics across Europe, while interrogating the role of women within the domestic sphere. The political transformations following the collapse of state socialism across Eastern Europe and Central Asia continue to shape contemporary nationalist rhetoric, gender politics, and ideas of tradition. The resurgence of right-wing ideologies across Europe echoes patterns long familiar within post-socialist contexts: the instrumentalisation of “family values,” the re-domestication of women, and the framing of the nation as something to be protected from internal and external “others.” By focusing on the domestic space, my work reflects on how ideology enters the intimate sphere, how kitchens, living rooms, and family rituals become sites where political narratives are reproduced or quietly resisted.
If We Believe in Time
Diana Olifirova was born in Ukraine and have lived in London for over a decade. In recent years, living nomadically and being unable to return “home” home have shaped my relationship to place and belonging. Working with pinhole photography and long exposure, using meditation and focus as tools for each capture, Diana films herself, while transitioning between states — moving between countries, temporary homes, and identities, merging memory and presence, thinking about the idea of “home” and how fragile and meaningful it has become to me.
Born in Poland, Iga Koncka is a feminist artist and thinker. She holds a BA in Documentary Photography from the University of South Wales and an MA in Contemporary Photography: Practices and Philosophies from Central Saint Martins. Her research interests mainly concern feminist issues and public and private relations. Inspired by her Slavic roots and shaped by her international experiences, she creates work that attempts to transcend the limitations of a specific genre. Her multi-media practice embraces the beauty of different materials, processes, and ideas. She often uses critical play with a dose of joyful irony. She uses the notion of the postmodern image creation and image consumption culture to inform her practice.
Sofya Kryuk is a bilingual stage actress and theatre creator whose practice bridges rigorous Eastern European dramatic training with the contemporary British stage. Sofya is a graduate of the renowned Shchepkin Higher Theatre School, specializing in psychological drama and deep character exploration.
Sofya’s current project, Revolt, is an international theatrical collaboration that explores the deepest, most complicated relationship an artist can have: the claustrophobic battle between the inner supporter and the ruthless “inner critic”. Directed by visual artist and scenographer Katerina Jakovleva, Sofya leads the physical performance alongside live stage practitioners Kristina Baeva and Evgenia Vinogradova, with sound design by Alina R.J.
Yana is a Russian-born artist and she has always been driven by her desire for creating something meaningful that could transcend her long after she perishes. Every artwork Yana makes is deeply personal and a bit selfish, a true reflection of herself. Yana loves exploring rage, grief, sadness, and hopefulness, that comes with being away from your home, family, culture. Her work in this show is called Izbushka of Yaga (triptych), drawing on the chicken-legged house and the ultimate female character in almost any Eastern European folk tale – the original nomad, a woman that honours her rage, the guardian of the veil (in some iterations having one bone leg, holding space between the dead and the living).
RAUCHEN VERBOTEN
Noemi is a Polish Armenian artist based in London. Perpetually haunted and haunting the flat landscape between Lower Silesia and Warsaw, roadsides upon roadside carparks for lorry drivers, breton beans in platic cups, cigarettes without filters and company that is never fully there. Drawing from sites which have now been modernised into ‚normalcy’ and summoning the feeling of unease many a girl from off centre Europe can understand.
Time Capsule 51
Diana Serban is a Romanian visual artist based in London, working primarily with photography and installation. Her practice explores memory, identity, and constructed realities, investigating the quiet politics of domestic and public space, particularly in pre and post-communist Romania, where objects and material environments become containers of belonging, transformation, and emotional legacy.
Diapositive Memory
Laura’s practice began at eleven, rooted in analogue photography, landscape, and self-portraiture. She works across Polaroid, analogue, and digital formats and explore the threshold between memory and forgetting, spaces where the past persists but remains unreachable. Her photography is grounded in Eastern European landscapes, where terrain carries the residue of collective memory, displacement, and nostalgia. Training in Japanese cultural studies and the global art market has shaped how she reads images as objects with histories, mythologies, and institutional contexts. My series Memories in Mist brings this together as analogue photographs that function as documents of liminality, nostalgia, and loss. The photos are displayed in a repurposed Soviet siapositive viewer (diascope), which is a household device once used to store and display photographic transparencies.
Ksenia Kazintseva is an interdisciplinary artist with an interest in textile pattern and folk imagery, exploring migration and loss of home as well as her ‘Eastness’ and the acceptance of her in part non-Western identity despite growing up in the UK. Her workshops, immersive installations, poetry and paintings create opportunities to reflect and connect with ourselves, each other and nature. Her work is an attempt to return to a sense of home through nostalgia while creating a new one collaboratively with participants. She’s shown at the Saatchi Gallery, Fanzineist Vienna and beyond. She co-runs Izba Arts – a cultural platform supporting voices from the former Eastern Bloc (Central & Eastern Europe and Central Asia).
Works part of this show are a fabric book featuring the many misspellings and mispronounciations of Ksenia’s name and bilingual poetry contemplating the migrant identity, home and renewal through loss.
Deeply Blue
Created in February 2022 after her grandmother’s passing from COVID-19 in Ukraine, Deeply Blue emerged as a way to remain afloat through loss. The seated figure embodies тоска (toska) – that bittersweet Slavic ache holding both sorrow and tenderness, the sweet pain of remembering what we’ve loved. The saturated blue represents this ancestral pull and надежда (nadezhda) – hope. In Slavic tradition, blue holds both grief and sky, depth and infinite possibility. Shaping clay and pigment transformed absence into presence, sorrow into something to carry forward.
Paulina Korobkiewicz (b. 1993, Suwałki, Poland) is a London-based photographer and visual artist. Her work explores themes of cultural identity, memory, and the transformation of social spaces. Her projects focus on the visual and cultural landscape of her hometown and region as well as that of her current residence in the UK, documenting everyday scenes and environments with a sense of nostalgia and socio-political commentary, drawing from her own experience of migration. Her practice involves community-based research, conducting workshops, and mentoring. In addition to developing long-form personal projects, Paulina continues to undertake commissions and residencies.
Konrad Koźmiński, born 1989 in Cracow, Poland; photographer, self-publisher, social activist. Student of the Institute of Creative Photography at the Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic. Committed to documenting the changing world. His work focuses on the observation of peripheral areas and the search for living folklore. Particularly inspired by the countries of the Balkan Peninsula. Has participated in numerous exhibitions at home and abroad. Author and editor of the publication ‘Autumn Sense’. For many years co-organiser of the ‘Photographic Circle’ in a small district town.
These works are part of a series documenting Bulgarian traditions of scaring away winter and welcoming in spring, and is part of a series titled Whith ghosts and souls.
Usva Inei is a non-binary artist and art educator who mainly works through various forms of printmaking. Stemming from their lived experiences as a queer Russian immigrant, Usva reimagines and reclaims traditional Slavic imagery and patterns by bringing in elements of anti-war and pro-queer protest. Through their artwork, Usva hopes to consolidate a desire to connect with one’s heritage with a fight against a government that does not respect human rights, allow freedom of speech, or acknowledge queer identities.
Lesya creates abstract landscapes that explore the boundary between reality and perception. Walking without a fixed plan, she follows her intuition, light, and subtle signs in nature, focusing on fragments, textures, and quiet details where accidental compositions reveal hidden rhythms and a quiet mathematical order. The camera becomes a tool for attention rather than control, allowing images to emerge naturally and inviting viewers to slow down and look more closely. P.S. Her Instagram account was lost after her arrest during a protest in Moscow. She is currently developing a new website.
Eclipse (zine)
Laura Bivolaru works in the field of photography, between artistic research, writing, curating, and education. She works with photographs, text and moving image to explore the tension between nation and individual, and to reveal the impact of time, collective narratives and the history of her home country, Romania, on lived experience. ‘Eclipse’ reflects on a family history of twins, focusing on the artist’s monozygotic twin sisters. Through photographs taken in their home in Romania combined with fragments of film accidentally exposed to light during development, it explores how acts of splitting and duplication in biology and photography might multiply existence across time.
Aneliya Stoyanova (Anny) began working with clay later in life, earning an MA from Staffordshire University and joining the Green Grads UK 2024 cohort. She fuses nature and architecture inspired forms with digital innovation, using VR and parametric design to 3D-print in Parian porcelain. Her emotive, sustainable works explore the harmony between light, material, and technology.
Lusine is a London-based portrait photographer exploring identity, belonging, and the quiet tension between visibility and vulnerability.
Working with cinematic light and restrained colour, she creates intimate images that balance strength and fragility. Her practice is shaped by themes of cultural transition, femininity, and the human need to be truly seen beyond social roles. Through portraiture, she aims to reveal emotional depth within everyday life, inviting viewers to pause and reconsider how we look at one another — and what remains unseen.
Japanese, born in Russia and internationally brought up. Art historian and anthropologist. Trained as a jeweller in Hatton Garden, London, and still expanding her skills in rare jewellery techniques.
Kochi works in wax carving, hammering, knotting, granulation, kemboo and enamelling.
Constructed from oxidised metal fragments, this sculptural ‘flower’ emerges from remnants of industrial material. The work reflects on the fragile relationship between natural ecosystems and the infrastructures that shape them, referencing tensions around water resources in Central Asia where hydroelectric development, irrigation systems, and industrial extraction have reshaped entire landscapes. In this region, control of rivers by upstream countries can profoundly affect those downstream, where communities and agriculture depend on the flow of shared water systems. Emerging from scrap metal like a mutated plant, the form evokes both resilience and damage — a landscape in which nature struggles to survive within the very structures that exploit it.
Paper Hearts
Danaia Konstantinova is a Russian-born London-based fine art photographer and visual artist working primarily with analogue and historic, craft-based photography. Her practice explores the artistic and conceptual potential of analogue image-making, engaging with themes of identity, memory, cultural heritage, and temporality. Danaia focuses on handmade processes and the materiality of photography as a way to encode human memory in today’s world of digital saturation – how the medium’s imperfections, decay, and physicality mirror the ephemerality of lived human experience.
Alexandra Joanna Baker is a Polish-English multidisciplinary artist based in London. She works across painting, photography, collage, and other mediums, exploring themes of home, memory, belonging, and womanhood. Drawing on Eastern European heritage and personal histories, her practice reinterprets folk motifs and cultural symbols through a contemporary lens, often centring women as carriers of memory, identity, and cultural continuity. Her work reflects on diaspora, inheritance, and the quiet strength found in everyday narratives.
Triptych. Still Here. Still.
Olivia Popica is a Romanian-born actor and photographer based in London. Her practice brings together performance and analogue photography, using the slowness of film to construct images that feel temporally suspended.
Influenced by her upbringing in Transylvania, Olivia is drawn to the mythical, the obscured, and the partially revealed. Olivia often works with distant figures or averted self-portraiture, not as concealment, but as a way of preserving interiority and ambiguity.
The Romanian concept of ‘dor’, a form of longing intertwined with love, loss, and acceptance, which doesn’t have an English equivalent, underpins her work. It reflects a yearning for connection and belonging that coexists with the loneliness inherent to the individual experience.
The Feeling of Home
Lizaveta Khikhlushka is a London-based artist, originally from Belarus, Minsk, whose work explores how a city becomes personal. The Feeling of Home is the concluding drawing in the series of works portraying meaningful places described by Belarusians and created for Belarusians living away from home. The final work depicts the artist’s own home, indicating that her home is now also far from her.
Johana eating pickle while reading Milan Kundera…
Johana Kasalicka is a Czech photographer based in London, working at the intersection of documentary, staged portraiture, and fashion. Her practice explores youth culture and its social and political realities, with a particular focus on Eastern European communities and diasporic experience. Drawing from her own migrant perspective, her work further explores identity, belonging, and nostalgia.
Invitation or Escape
Polina Nochka is a London-based interdisciplinary artist and visual communicator whose practice investigates the relationships between people and places under shifting social and political contexts. Polina’s work unfolds through mapping, data visualisation, collage, and installation, creating spaces for audiences to interact, reflect, and engage with the hidden layers of history and experience. Drawing on archival documents, site visits, and collected viewpoints, Polina constructs layered visual narratives that contrast multiple perspectives and uncover the complex histories embedded within urban environments. By experimenting with visual methods of representation, Polina seeks to reveal the richness of past experiences and their continuing resonance to contemporary life.
Wisła
Aga Nowak is based in Battersea and London has been her home for almost 20 years. Aga came here from the eastern borderline of Poland, from a small village which was built during communism – a State Agricultural Farm, called PGR. As a photographer, she is interested in human stories, common places, natural world, environmental issues, the everyday life and works in both, Poland and the UK.
The “Wisła” (“Vistula”) project is a photographic record of everyday life along the Vistula River in Warsaw’s administrative district. In the summer of 2022, Aga walked approximately 40 km along the Vistula’s eastern and western banks & discovered a wild world hidden in the heart of a European capital. The selected photo shows one of the city’s beaches.
What does a man want? (installation)
Viktoria Pozdniakova is a doctor and editor from Saint-Petersburg based in London. Her current project is dedicated to masculinity. It consists of photos and interviews with different men from Saint-Petersburg and London. In her work, Viktoria explores how men from different cultures understand masculinity, whether gender defines people in general or how it doesn’t, depending on their definition of it.
She runs Diplopia magazine which also features video interviews and interactive engagements with these interviews, allowing audiences to build connection with the participants of the project and answer the questions for themselves, exploring the way the may be affected (or not) by systems we are placed within.
The Value of Loss
Natalia Millman is a visual artist exploring emotional and natural environments within and around her, intuitively drawing on a range of materials, media and sources to create intimate and often collaborative pieces. Themes Natalia explores are connected with memory, transience, change and post-traumatic growth.
WEIGHT ON IT is a durational ritual centered on reflection and care through feeling-focused craft.
Beads — scattered like secrets — are slowly gathered into words and poems that call back to queer migrant histories.
The poem that Emilia beads was originally written for a performance at the Queer Migrations Festival 2025; it is about the threads of connection to ancestry, longing across estrangement and renegotiating belonging.
The collective beading ritual draws from Tatar cultural marriage practices — traditions that acknowledge departure from family in order to build something new. Beading becomes both preparation and remembrance, a reflection on transformation.
Consider: What do you want to carry forward? What do you want to release? Create a word, a short phrase, or a sentence with the beads.
Performed by Emilia Nurmukhamet, facilitated by Amy-Rose Edlyn and Dear Annie from Bold Mellon Collective. Previously featured at the Queens House (2026), Firepit Art Gallery & Neverwhere Exhibition (2025).
